When "Inside Out" was released almost a decade ago, it tapped into something global audiences didn’t know they needed. Being able to look at our emotions from the inside out proved to be an incredibly cathartic experience, as mental health is a concept that anybody can relate to. Now, with the release of "Inside Out 2," we find the main character Riley as a teenager. While this is also a phase most of us can relate to, for the filmmakers it’s been a while, and creating an authentic story about a teenager might prove to be tricky. This is where Riley’s Crew comes in.
I sat down to speak with "Inside Out 2’s" director Kelsey Mann and producer Mark Nielsen, and as you can imagine, neither of them are teenage girls. To properly tell Riley’s story, they enlisted the help of an “advisory group” that became known as Riley’s Crew, and Leslie Mann gave me a very logical explanation as to why this was a necessity.
I sat down to speak with "Inside Out 2’s" director Kelsey Mann and producer Mark Nielsen, and as you can imagine, neither of them are teenage girls. To properly tell Riley’s story, they enlisted the help of an “advisory group” that became known as Riley’s Crew, and Leslie Mann gave me a very logical explanation as to why this was a necessity.
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00:00I heard that you had a test audience of teenage girls to see how they responded to that.
00:05Yeah, they were really an advisory group.
00:08Yeah.
00:08And I had that idea pretty early on because I want to make sure the story that we're telling is authentic and real.
00:16Yeah.
00:17And when I was a 13-year-old girl, it's been a while since I've been 13,
00:22I can try to remember that because it's kind of a memorable time in your life,
00:27but it's been a while and I was never a 13-year-old girl.
00:29I'm too gross to go anywhere ever again!
00:33Welp, that's a preview of the next 10 years.
00:36I need a whole group of people, so I pitched to them.
00:38I'm like, can I have an advisory group of teenage girls?
00:41And they're like, sure.
00:42I thought I had to sell them on it, but they're like, how many do you want?
00:44I was like, oh, nine?
00:46And so they got like nine of them.
00:48And just arbitrary, like what sounds reasonable.
00:50Yeah, yeah, you want to have enough of a group that you have different opinions and diversity with even within that group.
00:56And even where they're from, I go, don't grab people that are just by Pixar in the Bay Area.
01:01Like, go out into the nation a little further.
01:04And so we had people from all over the country.